The Daytona 500 MMII

This Technical article address's a very important part of owning maintaining and upgrading your Jeep or 4x4 rig. We all run big heavy over sized tires. The basic fact is the stock tire carrier on every Jeep every manufactured is not up to the task. So I am going to show you how I built a heavy duty tire carrier out of the 1.75 inch DOM tube. I will go through it step by set and give you the sizes and dimensions of each part and each piece.

This is the first tire carrier I decided to use round tube on. I usually use some form of 2 inch box square tube for a bumper and tire carrier. This one I went with round tube.

Let's start by looking at a picture of the bumper we are starting with. This bumper was created by a friend for another friend. We are going to wrap this bumper around the rear frame of CJ8 scrambler that we are rebuilding. But that is another article. So let's examine this pictures and see that is already has a 2 bolts mounted into it to hold that tire carrier. I also got the top tube that mounts between the bolts to hold the tire carrier. The bumper is 2 inch DOM tube and the bar that sits on top of the bumper and is the base for the tire carrier is 1.5 inch DOM. This bar is 37.5 inches long from end to end. In the picture this bar is the long bar on the right by the tape measure.

When you take a close look at this picture you can see a little Duck in the lower left. He is my little helper.

 

The design I am using is show here. These 3 tubes are the main supports for the tire. The two outer tubes were built using a piece of DOM 39 inches long. I put them in the bender at the very end, so the bend is as short as the bender will allow. I then bent them to 90 degrees. After the bend they are about 11 inches high from the floor. The requirement I have is to make the plate that hold the tire at least 5-6 inches from the tube. So the way these are sitting I will have plenty of clearance for the plate. I have at least 8 inches from the end of the tubes to the face of the 3 tubes. The middle tube does not need be that long. I used two short pieces that I had laying around and welded them together, this is why you can see the joint in the middle of the center tube. The middle tube was 34.5 inches long so I would recommend a piece about 36 inches long. As always you should make the parts too long then cut them off once they are welded together. If you really look closely you can see that these 4 tubes are not exactly the same length. I will bee trimming all of them before mounting the center section plate.

The wide of the triangle at the base is 32.5 inches. The 3 bent bars are welded so that the center of the 2 middle tubes is 28 inches from the top of the bar that forms the base of the tire carrier.

Here are a couple of the other secret drawing we were thinking about for this project.

This picture show the 4 pieces together. What is that top piece for. It looks weird, but it is for a removable rack. It uses the same bent tube and will go up and around the tire. We are going to get a piece of 1.5 inch tube and mount it to the rack. the 1.5 inch tube will then slide right into the 1.75 inch DOM. This is make a strong mount and we will put a pin like a trailer hitch pin through that 2 tubes once the are slid together. This is a slick way to have an easily removable rack. When the rack is on on the tire carrier the upper tube won't stick up too far and wont be in the way. This mask is also a good place to mount a radio antenna, for either HAM or CB.

 

The center section is made out of 1/4 inch plate. As you can see I have a skid plate from a dump truck or something else that I am using as the source material. I got a cardboard box and cut out a template the same size as the tire carrier that was on the Jeep Scrambler before we started this rebuild. Once I had the template made I traced it onto the plate using a welders soap pencil. This way I can see the line through my helmet when I start cutting it out. I used my plasma cutter to quickly and easily cut out the circle. Once it was cut I used my bench mounted grinder to clean up the edges and then I checked it against the template. I was a bit out of round so I traced the part that was not round and went back to the grinder.